


Off-Center Shots and Well Laid Plans

by imperfectkreis



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 19:58:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4072618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperfectkreis/pseuds/imperfectkreis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fallout: New Vegas setting swapped with Dragon Age: Inquisition characters. Courier!Cullen and FTrevelyan!Benny. Yeah I don't know either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Off-Center Shots and Well Laid Plans

Cullen wakes with the memory of a woman, a broken nose, and a gun. The gun was pointed at his head, her boot at his crotch. With his hands tied, she said she was sorry it had to be this way. She was sure he was a real nice guy, trying to make an honest living as a courier. But he had the wrong package. That was gonna be hers. And there was nothing honest about her. Well, at least she wasn’t a fink. She’d taken the burlap sack from his head, looked him dead in the eye, kissed him sweet and long with the Mojave dirt flying up around their faces. Then she pulled the trigger.

Seven days passed. Seven days Cullen was out cold, tended to by the kindly Doc who says a robot pulled him out of the grave up on the hill. Turns out, Cullen was still kicking, even with the bullets to his brain. Right miracle it is. As if this world could still believe in miracles. 

The Doc gives him an old vault suit to put on, but it’s not quite big enough in the shoulders. They never were. So Cullen ties the sleeves off around his waist, leaving him just in a white-sleeveless someone must have put on him to preserve his modesty, because he doesn’t recognize it as his own. His own is probably covered in blood.

He touches his fingers to where the bullets went through. Two, the pistol went off twice. He can feel the skin there, a little jagged yet with the stitches. Doc chides him not to touch it, wiping the wound down with alcohol that burns on contact. Cullen touches other places too, the crown of his head. It’s stubbly at most, his blond curls gone. Bullets to the brain, right. The Doc must have shaved his head.

So the Doc asks him about his family history, jokes that he probably doesn’t have a family history of getting shot. Even if he did, he’s not sure how that would make a difference. Cullen tries to chuckle, tries to be polite. 

In the end, the Doc shows him off with a Pip-boy and a smile. Cullen feigns like he doesn’t know how the computer strapped to his wrist works. He pretends like the weight of it is unfamiliar on his wrist. The fewer people who know his history, the better. That’s why he ran so far. To get away from those who would perpetually label him soft, ‘Vaultie.’

The bartender sends him towards Vegas, saying the pretty woman with a broken nose and fancy clothes came through with a couple of goons. Real city type, she was. Cullen knows it’s her but no one has a name for him. He pays for his drink with a syringe from his pocket. Bartender doesn’t ask twice about it, just slides him some change because the value of the med-x is more than the half-beer he drank. Cullen already wishes he had kept the med-x.

He walks the path to Nipton, because the shorter route to the Strip is blocked. Stopping twice, he raids little shacks, looking for anything to trade. Anything that isn’t a syringe because like hell he’s giving any more of them up. He keeps those for himself. At least half a dozen were still in his pack when he woke at the Doc’s.

On the second stop, he takes a dose, pillows against his anxiety, the chem floods through his skin, pricking and subsiding until he feels more like himself. Calm, good. So good.

At Nipton, a man with a Wolf’s head tells him to tread carefully. To spread word of what he has seen in this town of profolgates. All Cullen sees is piles of bodies turned to ash as they burn on pyres of tires. The air carries the stench of rubber and flesh. 

Cullen covers his nose. The Wolf calls himself Samson; his master, Coryphaeus. And together they will bring a new order upon the Wasteland.

Cullen is only trying not to puke on his shoes. But no, that’s not true. Because he’s also trying to forget he knows this Wolf. As the Wolf knows him. 

He reaches Novac, the giant concrete dinosaur greeting him before anyone else can bother. People are wrapped up in themselves. He cannot blame them. No one bothers. 

From Novac he’s told to go to Boulder City. In Boulder City he gets a name. 

Tre-vel-yan. 

Awfully weird name, he comments. The man who provides it, broad, gruff, with a beard and the type of composure one wouldn’t associate with a hired thug, calls himself Blackwall. He says that everyone will know the name Trevelyan at the Strip. Cullen won’t have much trouble. The pale-faced boy at his side mutters the thoughts inside Cullen’s head with sharp precision.  
“Need, need, the needle, makes me forget, makes me warm. Makes the world not hurt so much. Too bright. The sun is so bright, and the sky so high. Overseer didn’t know the half of it-Red, the Red will make me better-”

Cullen draws his gun on the boy, not knowing how else to respond. Blackwall threatens to knock him out, if he doesn’t lower his weapon. Cole means no harm.

A favor for a favor and Cullen makes it past the locked gates of the Strip. The Securitrons, menacing faces on their flickering screens, scan his passport and let him through. He’s never seen 2,000 caps in one place in all his life, so the passport is Maker sent. 

Indeed, he asks about Trevelyan, people answer. They say he wants Skyhold, the second casino down. She’s always trouncing around like she owns the place. Well, actually, she does. Or the family does. Something like that. 

Inside Skyhold are flowing drinks, flowing caps. Smiles on women’s faces and beckoning hands that want his time. But he’s looking for a woman with a broken nose. Tre-vel-

“Half of us have that name,” the woman across the bar says with some level of exasperation. “Part of being a family.”  
But Cullen can already see she’s not the right one, with high cheekbones and straight hair, straighter nose too. “With a broken nose?”

She puts a hand to her forehead. “Sabina.”

Being pointed in the general direction, he thanks the woman, puts down caps for her drink.

In the center of the casino floor, a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, Cullen recognizes the curl of her hair, the way she’s biting her tongue, the barest hint of pink flashing between painted lips. A broken nose. 

He steps towards her, maybe too fast because a guard next to her, wisp of a girl with blonde hair steps between them.   
“Oi! What do you want?”

Sabina’s eyes narrow. “I heard you weren’t dead,” she says it like she’s been expecting him all along. “Let him be, Sera.”  
“Yeah,” Cullen has nothing clever to say.

She takes a sip from her glass. “So are you here as some sort of revenge fantasy? I may not be much with a pistol, but I’d rather it be more, personal, this time.” The edge of Sabina’s switchblade, flicked from her waist, catches the light.

“Yes,” he fumbles, trying to buy time, “more personal, upstairs, maybe, alone, maybe?”

Teeth, crooked, like tools of survival, flash as her lips curl. “You’d think yourself clever, wouldn’t you? Yes, let’s go, alone.” Her eyes rake his body. “This’ll be fun.”

He falls into step behind her, keeping his eyes down. He’s bigger than her, stronger. But once already he has been at her mercy. There is no reason for him to assume he won’t be captured a second time. But he follows the scent of her perfume to the elevator. 

Moving like water against glass, she is against him, striking their lips together, a realization of their earlier kiss, that one a mockery, this one, tangible. The elevator ticks up, floor by floor. Cullen feels the heat of her body against his, the way her hands curl around the rolled waist of his borrowed vault suit. She holds on so tight, her knuckles lighten. Her cheeks rosy as she pulls back. That smile again, a smile of a Tribal girl who broke apart bones with her teeth. Now set on breaking him apart.  
It was a trap. One he would walk into again for that heat, that lust. 

In her suite she tears him apart, layer by layer, striping away clothing that was never his. She sees the track marks on his arms, kissing against the freshest of the lot. 

“Is this because of me? Because of this?” Her fingers press against the scar where the bullet went through. This time, there is no kindly Doc to wipe it down with alcohol. Just Sabina’s painted nails against the wound she inflicted. “No,” she realizes, tilting her head. “These are old, you’re a Fiend?”

Cullen shakes his head, it’s too hard to explain. It’s the thing he wishes to forget. The thing curled up inside him that refuses to leave. He worries every day that it grows larger, that it will fill the cavity inside his chest, choke out his breath, rupture him. The med-x keeps it quiet, the memory of who he was.

If only her bullet could have taken away that.

She pulls aside her skirts, unwilling to undress although she has exposed him utterly. Her fingers lace across his chest, dipping in to find definitions of muscle. Her dark eyes expose little of her thoughts, but he feels it well enough, she’s appraising him.  
“I know what you are,” she whispers. As she speaks, she sinks on his cock, fluid, like dancing. 

He fills up the space inside her, though her secrets are not known to him. Only that she’s a woman who took the package he was meant to deliver. That she has everything; he, nothing but wounds on his arms, a flight from a monster he refused to serve. 

She rides him in fluid motions, keeping her hands pressed against his chest. He thrusts to meet her, their hips knocking together. When he reaches to touch her, she permits it, letting him slide off the shoulder of her dress, exposing her breast. Small but round, with her dark nipple taut. He wants to lean forward and taste, but she holds him back. Her flawed teeth flash; he’s reminded of his perfect ones.

“So pretty,” Sabina coos, moving one hand from his chest to his head, stroking against the short crop of new hair. “I think you’re even prettier with your hair gone. I did like the curls though.”

Slamming her hips down, she coaxes his orgasm. Her fingers roll against her clit as he comes in long spurts, whimpering through the end. She pulls off, guiding her hips over his mouth, pressing her cunt to his lips, ordering him to lick her, to taste himself. 

“You look even prettier with me on you.”

He tastes himself, bitter against his tongue. And Maker, Maker he wants to make her come. Wants to dissect her as she has done to him. So he winds his tongue against her sex, trying to tilt higher, to catch her clit with the lashings of his tongue, but she shifts her hips, just out of reach, laughing as she strokes herself to completion. She shudders above him, praising his name. “Good, good Courier.”

She doesn’t know his name.


End file.
